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No matter what piece of technology you are using, you are only as secure as you want to be. Most people don’t bother password protecting the data on a USB drive, and even then it’s not a guarantee that your data is safe. BlurPort wants to secure all of your removable USB storage with your choice of personal security measures.

The current state of consumer grade security options for removable storage borderlines on being just a formality. Key fobs that can be copied with little effort, or drives that can just be removed from “secure” casing and inserted elsewhere. The point at which your data is actually secure usually comes at a price point that is not worth it to most users, especially if the information they are carrying isn’t terribly important to begin with.

As we move further along the Bring Your Own Device pipeline, it will become more important for secure removable storage options to exist at reasonable price points and actually be secure. The student-run BlurPort hopes to solve this problem with an inexpensive app driven USB drive that relies on your smartphone to grant access to the drive once it is connected to your computer.

Aakash Patel of BlurPort sat down with me recently and explained how BlurPort is expected to work moving forward.

When you connect your BlurPort to a computer, the drive will patiently wait for approval from your smartphone in order to grant the computer access to the information. The BlurPort app on your phone will offer many different ways to authenticate yourself, from facial recognition and eye scanning to NFC tokens, even pattern trace passwords on your smartphone. You will have many of the same authentication methods you already have available to you in order to unlock your phone in the first place, which adds a second factor to the authentication of the drive. Once you have authenticated yourself, the app will connect with your BlurPort and grant you access to data stored on the drive. If you disconnect from the computer, you will need to re-authenticate yourself through the app.

BlurPort will offer 8GB of storage built into the drive, however, removing the cap at the other end of BlurPort will reveal a female USB connector that you will be able to connect additional removable storage to. Whether you have a flash drive with a higher storage capacity, or you plan to connect multiple terabytes of storage from a large drive, you’ll have the ability to either pass the data through the drive or encrypt the additional drive so it can only be accessed when connected through your BlurPort. The app will see the drives separately, and allow you to secure the BlurPort and the added drive with different authentication methods if you choose, and it will allow you to flip back and forth between the two drives as though they were connected separately.

The BlurPort Kickstarter walks you through the process the team has gone through in building their concept from scratch. From development board to their latest concept, BlurPort was built to offer this unique solution.

Their Kickstarter page includes some interesting perks for those who contribute more than the $109 for the drive itself. Custom laser engraved variants of the casing, for example, exist for contributing $250 or more. The BlurPort team has already shown off working prototypes of the hardware, with plans to show off the app and the final casing designs in the future.

If you’re the type to need secure, removable storage, BlurPort is absolutely worth checking out for yourself.